Do you need to re-design?

As daunting of a task as it may seem, your website is your company’s image and needs to look presentable. Ask yourself, how long have I had my current web site design? If your answer is more than 3 years, then its time to start thinking redesign.

Web technology advancements are very rapid and every year the web breaks through with new and improved web applications, usability, design and back end programming. Car manufacturers often change their models every 3-5 years. Always introducing something new, more sleeker, faster, with better gas mileage etc. If the Honda Accord still looked the same as the one from the year 2000, their competition would definitely surpass them. But they still make minor changes every year to give their customers something new to look forward to. Just like cars, web sites also need a fresh design every once in a while. If you aren’t going to do it, your competitors will. Your site may look great to you, after all you approved on the design and paid for it, but in reality it may not be all that groovy.

You may ask, who is to say what looks good and what doesn’t. Well, nobody really. Even web designers differ in taste and may sometimes be on opposite ends of the spectrum. To do a quick reality check, look at some web sites throughout your industry. See what they offer, how they have designed it. Is it appealing to you? Do these sites give you ideas for your own? Does it bring out the competitive edge in you? Sure, some sites may make you feel just down right heroic inside. We aren’t saying your current website is super UGLY, although that maybe the case. That is why it is important to sit and evaluate your web site. No matter how great your product or service may be, if your web site doesn’t grab your potential customer’s attention within the first 3 seconds, they most likely will hit that infamous BACK button or close the browser all together. Sadly, web surfers aren't very patient and need something stimulating to look at once they hit that GO button.

1. Evaluate your site’s usability, the look and feel and most importantly content and it’s placement.
2. Send a quick survey to some of your customers and gather their input. Your customer will appreciate that you value their opinion and will gladly provide you with constructive feedback.
3. If possible, contact a professional web design firm and ask them what they think. Actually, contact a few. Most web design companies will usually give you their professional opinion for free, with hopes that you select them as your service provider.
4. Look through your site, and see how well it conveys your products and services to someone who knows nothing about it.
5. Take a peek at your competitor’s Websites in your industry and other industries to obtain ideas.
6. Ask yourself, was your site launched just because everyone else had one and forgotten, or does it really do something tangible?
7. Get your hands on a web analytics report that tells you how many users have visited your site. You can usually obtain this by logging into your host’s website or by calling them. This can give you needed information on how many hits your site gets, where most of your viewers go and how long they stay. This is also a great tool to gain some insight on your next big marketing campaign.

Once you have gathered all this data, evaluate your budget and see if there is some room for a web site redesign. If so, then please get it done. You only get one chance to make a first impression, so make it the right one. Appearance is so important and will only continue to increase the demand of great designed sites, so stay with the flow. Don’t drown your organization in this sea of ugly web sites.

Courtesy: www.wpdfd.com

Top Five Ways to Make Your Site More Popular

The Web has grown into a real jungle, and finding cool new sites nowadays isn't always the easiest thing in the world. If you have a Website yourself, you're dealing with the other end of this issue. How do you get noticed online, and is there anything you can do to increase your popularity?

There certainly is! Here are the top five ways you can strengthen your site and increase your online visibility.

1. Strong Hosting

This first point is mostly important for those who don’t have their own Website yet but eagerly want to create one. After you have selected your domain name, the next step is to choose a hosting plan. There are many good, affordable alternatives, but what professionals usually recommend is specialized blog hosting. This form of Web hosting allows you to set up a professional-looking Website in no time at all. Why is this important to mention when it comes to making your site more popular? Well, without strong hosting, you won’t be able to handle a traffic to your new Website, which means you’ll have no chance at all of becoming well liked.

Of course, finding strong hosting is often easier said than done. The hosting industry has grown very popular in recent years, and this has lead to large numbers of companies offering various hosting services. But don’t be fooled by their tricky ways of making it sound as if they are the best in the industry. We would recommend you partner up with a company that has a strong reputation and experience in the business. You might start at Web Hosting Search for reviews and other information to help you find the right fit.

When it comes to hosting, you should compare the different features included with the plan. Make sure you are guaranteed at least 99.9% uptime and that customer support is easy to get hold of. You never know when you could need them. Likewise, it is also good to know exactly what kind of numbers in terms of disc space and bandwidth will you be allowed to use and manage. Some providers also forbid their clients to upload music or video files to their servers even if it is for personal use. It's important to ask customer support to resolve such issues before purchasing a plan. Some other things you might consider asking are whether your domain name registry information will be protected and how many different e-mail accounts will you be allowed to use as part of the hosting agreement.

2. Optimize Your Website

In order to be truly successful online, you will have to get a high ranking in search engines. To succeed in this, you should learn as much as you possibly can about search engine optimization (SEO). The subject of SEO is vast and can be quite daunting at first, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be able to see the benefits immediately and will probably wonder why you didn’t get started with it earlier. A few things you can do to get started are to make sure you're using the proper keywords and to write for your visitors as well as for search engines. Writing for search engines is important, since you want to get high rankings, and writing for visitors is of the essence because you want them to stick around and return to your Website.

When you are satisfied with the keywords and content on your site, it is time to start working with link building. Search engines determine much of the value of a certain page/site by looking at the number of inbound links. Link exchange is one of the most popular and successful ways to get a good rank on search engines, and it’s really easy to do. Simply visit a Website that you like and ask the Webmaster if they are interested in a link exchange — it doesn’t have to be any more complicated than that.

Having something interesting and distinctive on your page is a great way to attract potential link partners. For example, if you are running a Website about domain names, why not add a domain name availability checker to your homepage? It will most likely attract links from other sites related to the niche, and people will tend to come back again if they want to know whether a domain is available or not. Try to be extra creative to set yourself apart from competitors.

3. Take Advantage of Social Media Optimization

Even though SEO should be a big part of your site optimization, it shouldn’t end there. Social Media Optimization is probably just as important, since it’s one of the strongest marketing tools available today. A social media optimization campaign should include a few different things. First, make sure the content on your site or blog is relevant to your topic and not out of date. Visit similar sites and join the discussion in leaving comments on posts/articles — don’t be afraid to say what's on your mind. Make yourself visible on Facebook and MySpace. Three other sites that can be useful for social media optimization are Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube. The two latter ones are not always applicable. Make sure you only take advantage of them when the time is right — you might do more harm than good if you don’t.

Obviously, don’t forget to include outbound links to your Website on any social media site you utilize. Even if your link has a "nofollow" attribute attached to it (e.g. like in Facebook), you will still attract new visitors and potential customers to the site. Lastly, your campaign should be built on friendly platforms, such as CoffeeCup Flash™ Blogger, which make it easy to create and edit content.

4. Get Your Visitors Involved

A crucial point to make your site grow in the number of visitors is by getting them involved. Try to write in a personal style, and don’t be afraid to leave an open question. If this shouldn’t do it, why not hold a contest? This will most likely get people talking about your site. The prize doesn’t have to cost a fortune, since people like to compete regardless of what the award is — it's human nature.

Other easy ways of getting your visitors involved is by including a forum on your site or the possibility to comment on your posts/articles. Everyone wants to express their own personal ideas and thoughts on topics, and by allowing them doing so, you also increase the chance of visitors returning to see how was their feedback appreciated. As an added bonus, if the topic is extra popular, the discussion could attract interest from other Websites as well!

5. Emphasize Usability in Your Design

Investing in a good design is more important than some people seem to think. With a beautiful design, you will grow in trust among your readers/visitors. An important fact to remember is not over-designing the Website. It doesn’t matter how many hours you’ve put into designing the site if no one understands how to use it. Let some non-Internet-savvy friends navigate through your Website before launching it at a full scale. If they find it easy, so will the rest of your visitors.

It is difficult to say exactly what makes a beautiful and functional design. What looks good to one person might seem terrible for another. However, there are basic trends in Web design, and if you follow these, you can be sure to please most of your visitors. A few popular Web design trends for 2009 are multi-column layouts, large illustrations, and lots of white space.

If you wish to stay on the safe side, then it is a good call to make the layout and design features on the page easily accessible and simple to understand. Try to use standard coding and avoid over-the-top Flash animations. Some people may have browser settings that prevent them from viewing Flash, which means you might lose valuable visitors. Try to think how the visitor thinks, and your Website will grow more popular and respected day after day.

Courtesy: www.wpdfd.com

Website Ranking With the Search Engine

Search engine optimization is the main way you should use to increase your internet based business traffic, the basic relation for that is the higher the ranking of this engine the more traffic is likely to pass through. Content should be unique and full of keywords and with the on page optimization set up for your website; this should attract the search engines bots to index it quickly.

The basic to SEO is content. This means any website which aspires to get top rankings and increase traffic has to have good, valuable content which are search engine friendly. You no longer write as you please.

Without the ranking accompanying your traffic, your website is as good as dead, regardless of how great your services or products are. Here are some tips to help you and your website to rank well and start getting endless supply of your targeted traffic from Bing Search Engine.

On the other hand, intense competition has made it very difficult for the websites to achieve those desirable high SEO rankings. As web masters does not know the way of working of web crawlers, SEO professionals of any good search engine marketing firm must be hired by the web masters to achieve higher SEO rankings.

The appropriate keyword density will help in the right optimization of the website without drawing the suspicion of spam. Apart from spreading these keywords in the article, you may include them in the heading and link of the website as well for better results.

Search engine optimization is the most important as well as necessary tool to improve your website ranking. Take time enough to analyze the follies in your website design and also check for any kind of deficiencies in the coding that can deter your website ranking.

Content management is another search engine marketing tip that can boost your business's prospects immensely. Through content management you can constantly update all the information in your site.

Once the page was stored on the search engines server a second program, called an indexer, extracted additional information from the webpage, and determines the weight of specific words.

The process may also depend on the original structure of your website. If your website uses templates that are not easily read by crawlers, for instance, this set of SEO techniques will go the extra mile to make sure that your pages are indexed by adding other website components.

The content of the website should also be constantly updated in order to achieve a higher ranking on the search engine. Contents should also be unique in order to improve on search ranking. A VA can update your website on a daily basis and keep track of the keywords or phrases being used to write each content or page of the website.

Once you determine the right keywords from your keyword research you will use them to drive highly targeted organic traffic to your website. If you know how to use SEO effectively you can significantly improve your website's ranking with the search engines and help your targeted audience to find your product or service.

Courtesy: www.goarticles.com

Major Web Design Challenges of the Future

With a title like this, one might think that there is a consensus among computer, networking and communications professionals as to what these three challenges are. This is not the case, of course. There are many, many challenges for Web designers (past, present and future) and those who stay abreast of high-tech industries could make many lengthy lists. However, there really are just a handful of truly troubling prospects, and this article will introduce you to what truly are three major Web design challenges of the future. There are others, but no one would discount the importance of the three discussed here.

1. Standards: Apple and Adobe are at war, figuratively speaking, over the fact that Apple will not make its iPhone Flash compatible. Not only that, the new Apple developer kit agreement forbids application makers from using non-Apple tools to make iPhone apps. This is a direct slap in the face to Adobe, whose new Creative Studio 5 includes tools for making Flash-based and other apps for Apple's mega-best-selling phone. The larger issue that it points up is that of standards. We are supposed to see video, animation and Flash-like functionality from the upcoming HTML 5. (Upcoming? Our interest is up, but when is it coming?)

If this sort of behavior metastasizes throughout the associated industries, the fluid and predictable nature of Web use may change. It would be hard, especially for small firms, to create various versions of its applications for different devices. Perhaps a few years ago, people would have wondered what the Web, and Web designers, had to do with phones. Today, however, a growing fraction of Web surfing is being done from a wide range of mobile devices. Standards create a predictable, stable environment, and the sooner the next multimedia-centric set is adopted widely, the better.

2. Color calibration: With the number of different devices displaying Web pages, whether the standard pages or alternatives made for some phone displays, there is no simple way to ensure color consistency. At the dawn of the Web (so long ago for some, just yesterday for others) it was common for some publishers to produce two layouts, one in the CMYK four-color space for printing, the other in the computer-monitor RGB color space. (CMYK refers to the four colors Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and black that is used in process color printing. RGB means Red, Green and Blue, the colors that monitors and other displays use.) However, it is not only the color space that affects the way color is perceived, the kind of display matters, too.

Today there are all kinds of different displays (LCD, LED, OLED, TFT, etc.) of all different sizes, some glossy and some matte, and the variation in color display is dramatic. Web designers used to spend tremendous amounts of time producing variations of sites for different displays (computer monitors, mobile phones, TVs, even in-dash car units). Some still do. Others are attempting to find the best single color scheme for their sites, one that will display at least acceptably precise colors on a multiplicity of displays. There is no easy answer to this one, as there are so many variables. Until a new, cross-platform and device-independent color calibration standard is in place, there is nothing else to do but the best possible job with the current tools, techniques and technologies.

3. Displays: In addition to having an impact on the colors used by Web designers, different displays present a problem of what is called screen real estate. If you do not prepare and deploy different sites for different platforms, you will have a site that displays properly in only one place, more than likely the computer monitor. However, mobile Web surfing from small-screen netbooks, handhelds, iPads and smart phones is growing fast, and may one day (soon) move from a strong second to first place in page views.

There is great progress being made in interposing some software routines between the site and the receiver's display, so that the correct size parameters and design alternatives will be presented depending on the size of that display. That part of the problem is being solved, perhaps, but there are other display technologies coming that will present other hurdles. Displays that are 3D, flexible and/or capable of being rolled up in a tube will have properties (and present problems) we do not even know about yet. A major issue with portable displays of every kind, of course, is how they look in sunlight, shade, changing conditions and at different viewing angles. There is an amazing amount of money going into display R&D today, you had better believe it.

Sure, there are other challenges for Web designers, but these three (standards, color calibration and displays) can confidently lay claim to being toward the top of any tech-savvy observer's list.

Courtesy: http://www.goarticles.com